Meaningful Ways to Engage Your Madrichim in the Classroom
Want to enhance your religious school classroom? One way to do this is by engaging your madrichim as committed classroom assistants. This session will provide you with ways to more successfully utilize madrichim in your classroom, not simply as an extra set of hands, but as a partner in educating your students. Learn about the success of the National Madrichim Fellowship as a model and indicator of how an investment in professional development for madrichim can lead to a more highly engaged classroom...and may even create future teachers!
Additionally, come to learn about Next Steps: National Madrichim Fellowship. Exceptional Jewish teens serving as Madrichim from across the country are invited to participate in the second year of this national initiative. Through Next Steps, Madrichim will participate in monthly sessions that include a highly interactive virtual environment, expert training, tangible classroom skill building, peer support, and field advancing.
Our Partner
- Congregational Learning
- Family Engagement
- Teen Engagement
- Webinar
- Leadership
Erica Hruby, M.A. is a Jewish educator with nearly 30-years of teaching, curriculum writing, and professional development experience in Jewish community, academic, and residential environments. Erica serves as Senior Manager, National Teen Education and Engagement at The Jewish Education Project. She is also the founder of Anchored Parenting, LLC where she serves as a parent educator and coach. Erica has an M.A. from Georgia School of Professional Psychology in Clinical Psychology with a focus on children and adolescents. She lives on the West Coast of Florida with her high school sweetheart with whom she shares two adult daughters.
Melissa Pescatore is the Director of Religious Education at Temple Shaari Emeth in Manalapan, NJ. Serving as principal in the congregation where she grew up, she is passionate about instilling a love of learning and building a strong, positive Jewish identity in her students. She is also a proud graduate of the LEEP Fellowship at NewCAJE and is the co-leader of NewCAJE’s National Madrichim Fellowship.
Discover more
Congregation Kol Ami White Plains, NY. Mesorah (tradition) is a choice-based model for 7th-12th graders that includes CORE learning and hands-on, experiential, project-based learning electives.
One of the successes of J-Life is that it continues to build community among parents. Most of the learners who started in kindergarten have stayed to continue going on to the upper grades. Parents express that they have a lot of fun participating in J-Life and that they enjoy coming to these experiences.
Living Judaism is an all-inclusive experiential learning model of Jewish Education. The purpose of the model is to engage every learner, provide carefully constructed learning experiences, build a strong identity, root students firmly in tradition, and create memories to last for years to come.